Standards News Archives

RenderDoc 1.2 is now available as the latest feature update to this leading graphics debugging tool for Vulkan, OpenGL, and Direct3D across all major platforms.

In addition to Linux 4.21 set to land Adiantum as the crypto algorithm backed by Google following the company's falling out with the NSA's Speck crypto for low-end data encryption, Streebog is also set to be introduced as a cryptographic hash function developed in large part by the Russian government.

This past week was an ISO C++ committee meeting in San Diego, which happened to be their largest meeting ever, and they managed to accomplish a lot in drafting more planned changes around the C++20 language update.

The OpenMP ARB has announced the release today of the major OpenMP 5.0 specification. OpenMP 5.0 has been three years in the making and is a big update to this parallel programming specification relative to past updates.

Earlier this year the Speck encryption algorithm was added to the Linux kernel as at the time Google intended to use it for EXT4/fscrypt file-system encryption with low-end Android devices. But Speck with all its controversy due to being developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) led to immediate backlash. The removal of Speck from the Linux kernel tree is finally happening.

The concept has been talked about before and there has been some previous work in this direction while "CLVK" is a newly-established effort for getting OpenCL running on top of Vulkan drivers.

It's been a number of months since last having any major news to report on POCL, the "PortableCL" project providing a portable OpenCL/compute implementation that can run on CPUs, select GPUs, and other accelerators.

Codeplay, the company behind tools like clspv for running OpenCL C code on Vulkan, today released ComputeCpp 1.0.

The latest company joining The Khronos Group to promote cross-platform industry APIs is Magic Leap.

The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018.

The Khronos Group has today announced a new maintenance release to OpenCL 2.2.

POCL, the Portable Computing Language, that aims to be a portable and open-source OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs as well as AMD HSA targets and more, is out with a new feature release.

Not only is there a new Rust release this week but the Google developers have put out the Go 1.10 update.

Khronos' glTF transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues getting better. This 3D format has seen adoption by countless applications and engines and even usage within Microsoft products. Khronos' latest advancement to glTF 2.0 is a compression extension.

The Khronos Group today has announced the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program with a new open-source conformance test suite (OpenGL CTS) for this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API released last year.

Last year The Khronos Group announced NNEF as a open-source, royalty-free neural network format to combat the proprietary formats used today. In their last standards update of 2017, NNEF 1.0 is now available.

Unity is one of the big public users of the open-source Crunch DXT texture compression library. While it's no longer maintained by Rich Geldreich / Binomial, Unity has continued advancing this open-source code to further improve the compression ratio and speed.

VESA has rolled out DisplayHDR 1.0 as its newest standard. As implied by the name, the standard is in regards to specifying HDR (High Dynamic Range) quality for displays.

SYCL as a reminder is Khronos' higher-level OpenCL programming model based on C++. It's been a while since the last update, but a new point release is now available.

DisplayID 2.0 is now official as the VESA standard to succeed the long-used Extended Display Identification Data "EDID" by TVs, monitors, and other consumer electronics.

Lizard was previously developed as LZ5 and is a lossless compression algorithm that yields a compression ratio similar to zip/zlib/Zstd/Brotli but at very fast decompression speeds.

NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University continue working on the Slang project for providing improved functionality around existing Direct3D HLSL and OpenGL GLSL shaders as well as developing its own shading language.

There continues to be progress made on the new Apple/W3C backed web graphics API dubbed "WebGPU" that has the backing of major stakeholders.

The OVR_multiview OpenGL Extension developed via the OpenVR initiative has been around for several months in an incomplete form for allowing more efficient virtual reality (VR) rendering while now the extension is complete.

For C++20 the long-awaited modules system is likely to finally land. Facebook engineers have been working on a C++ modules implementation already for the GNU Compiler Collection.

Last winter we covered work being done out of the Imperial College in London on the wild results when fuzzing OpenGL shaders in uncovering issues in multiple OpenGL drivers, including the Mesa drivers. The scholarly results were recently published of this testing within Automated Testing of Graphics Shader Compilers.

If you need an extra reason to celebrate this weekend, next week the notorious S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) patent is set to expire!

Armis Labs has gone public today with "Bluebourne", an IoT-focused attack vector via Bluetooth. This Bluetooth attack does not require the targeted device to even be paired with the attacker or on discoverable mode, making it more frightening.

It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it's now available in draft form.

C++17 (formerly C++1z) is ready for its debut. C++17 has been formally approved by its committee and is just waiting on ISO publishing.

Today is The Khronos Group's big day at SIGGRAPH 2017 with a day full of talks about their different projects.

Last week marked the significant Vulkan 1.0.54 update with new extensions and other improvements while coming out today is the much smaller Vulkan 1.0.55 update.

Herb Sutter has once again provided a nice recap of the latest ISO C++ standards meeting that just wrapped up in Toronto.

Google and Codeplay have developed a new open-source tool for compiling OpenCL C code to Vulkan compute shaders.

The Khronos Group has announced their session line-up for SIGGRAPH 2017.

The Khronos Group has released the ratified glTF 2.0 specification this morning as their transmission format for portable 3D assets. glTF 2.0 can be integrated now not only within Khronos graphics API using applications/games but also within Direct3D and Metal.

The annual International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) conference has concluded this week in Toronto. Slides and other materials from this leading OpenCL conference are now available.

There are some exciting Khronos announcements this morning, including more open-source greatness!

Khronos has today unveiled the OpenVX 1.2 specification from this week's Embeded Vision Alliance Summit (EVS).

While the original SPIR intermediate representation from the Khronos Group was derived from LLVM IR, SPIR-V that's used by OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan is not. But there is still work underway on being able to translate from LLVM IR into SPIR-V via a new back-end.

The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard.

The Portable Computing Language (POCL) has issued a new release of their open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation.

Separate from Apple's recent proposals around WebGPU as a new low-level graphics API for the web, The Khronos Group appears to be readying to solicit ideas for "WebGL Next" as their next-gen web graphics API.

Yesterday I had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Here were some of the highlights.

While most are focused on the OpenXR VR announcement from The Khronos Group as well as the new Vulkan extensions, less people seem to be talking about their call for participation around a new "3D Portability Initiative", which if it succeeds could be a win for Linux gamers and others.

The Khronos Group not only is shipping Vulkan 1.0.42 with many new extensions for this week's GDC but the embargo just expired on even more exciting announcements!

On the desktop there's now Vulkan for Linux/Android systems, Direct3D 12 for Windows, and Metal for macOS systems as the latest-generation, performance-focused graphics APIs. On the web front, WebGL is the current dominant API that's derived from OpenGL ES but Apple is pushing an initiative for a new graphics API.

The VK9 project that's working to implement Direct3D 9 over Vulkan that's been under heavy development the past few months has reached new development milestones.

The OpenGL and OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suites (GL CTS) from The Khronos Group have finally went the way of their Vulkan CTS... open-source!

The HDMI Forum announced from CES today the upcoming release of the HDMI 2.1 specification.